DESC: Sayo Masuda's mother sold her to a seedy geisha house when she was 12, and she worked for years, until she quit the business to help out her tubercular brother--only to suffer from not only poverty on the streets but the opprobrium (and legal harassment) attached to a former prostitute. When she determined to return to the geisha life to pay for her brother's medications, he committed suicide. This bleak account of the decidedly unglamorous side of geisha life has stayed in print since it was first published in Japan in the late '50s, when it shocked the nation.